Southern innovation right on cue

Times like this we take our uplift where we can find it.

There’s to plenty to find – for starters, the reminders that not all Southland business has gone foetal during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Confirmation that the Tiwai smelter will continue operating under a rare special exemption is cause for relieved exhalations throughout the province.

Rio Tinto will soon announce the result of a strategic review of smelter’s future and, given how massively prolonged, expensive and difficult the procedure is to close and then reopen any aluminium smelter, it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to understand how seriously a shutdown would impact the chances of the 1000-job facility continuing.

Although the national authorities have determined that in this case the costs of including Tiwai in the shutdown exceed the benefits, the wellbeing of the men and women working there remains an imperative and the community most look for compelling assurances that this is achievable.

Rio Tinto is slowing its operations in Quebec and South Africa, working with the smallest staff numbers possible.

Elsewhere in Southland it’s heartening to see cases of companies stepping up, where they can.

Fi Innovations, a Provincial Growth Fund recipient, has found itself in its element, and in the most elemental way.

Possessed of New Zealand’s largest 3D printing manufacturing machine, the company has been classed an essential business and is now working like a good’un making medical parts of suddenlymajor social value such as nozzles for ventilators.

And the timing has been exquisitely good for the launch of Blue River Dairy’s premium sheep and goats milk formula, alongside a line of cow milk formula.

Nobody needs to look far to see the sorrowful sides of the lockdown. It’s evident in the presence of so many closed premises and facilities, also in some absences, like the stalling of Invercargill’s City Block project work.

Bluff’s oyster industry is in limbo, muttonbirders have been sent home, and rather than heading for the hills we’re being asked to keep out of the wilds, with DOC closing its huts, campsites, lodges and the Great Walks, and the Roar – the red stag hunting season – is off.

Duck season , which isn’t scheduled to start until May 2, is still scheduled and this will be welcome news for many of those caught in the lockdown, if only as something to look forward to.

In that respect they’ll be grateful they aren’t Olympians.

Fish and Game puts a case that although the conviviality of maimais may be affected, it’s possible to hunt wildfowl while practising safe distancing.

Whatever the lockdown status and strictures will be by the start of May is unclear, of course. Right now, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s overarching portrayal of the coming month is that it’s a time to hunker down, aside from taking walks – just walks, avoiding even the likes of playgrounds – for the air and the exercise.

And, apart from cheery gestures from a distance, pretty much avoiding others doing the same.

This is something to get our heads around.

Right now, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s overarching portrayal of the coming month is that it’s a time to hunker down